Aug 15

VIDEO- Not At Home

by Shane

We created NOT AT HOME with the sole aim to record and transmit the lived experiences of real women who have had to travel abroad to access abortion services and to create a space where those experiences could be heard. This video is made up of original video footage and a soundscape recorded on our trip to Liverpool, a trip we took in order to better understand the experience of women who have been forced to make that journey.

Since April 2016, we have been collecting anonymous testimonies from women online. We now have a crowd-sourced text of these women’s experiences of travelling abroad. In June 2017, we visited BPAS Merseyside in Liverpool. From these texts and our experience of recreating this journey, we are creating a durational art work featuring video, sound installation and live performance.

This video is a distillation of what we are trying to do with this entire piece: we are recording women’s real, lived experiences, in their own words and with as little filtration as possible, giving people on all sides a chance to listen and reflect on their testimony. We are not preaching to the converted, nor are we trying to change people’s minds, all we are doing is attempting to amplify the voices we think are most important in this conversation — those of the women for whom this has been a lived reality.